As always, great post! I definitely prefer the ones about virtue with shifting and ambiguous meanings and value, because I learn more from these. Also liked your suggestion for learning how to fail productively; this video is my go-to when I forget the importance of failure.
A question I have is whether ambition is properly to be thought of as a virtue of its own, or whether improperly-tuned ambition is more a symptom of failures in other virtues. For example, if you do not show enough ambition, this may be because you have a fear of failure or of responsibility, you don’t have faith in yourself, you give up at the first sign of trouble, or you are lazy. Those are things that implicate virtues like courage, boldness, confidence, endurance, or industriousness. If you are ambitious in the bad way, this typically demonstrates itself through ruthlessness, betrayal, dishonesty, and things like that (doing whatever it takes to get ahead). These things also implicate virtues like honor, loyalty, honesty, and so forth. It may be the case that if your other virtues are well-tuned, proper ambition will just naturally arise as part of the package.
Maybe I’m wrong, but in the full package of virtue, I see a sort of contentment (possibly about the struggle, but still contentment. Which appears antithetic with ambition to me. So I conjecture that while many parts of ambition are symptoms of virtue or lack thereof, a fundamental independent core still exists.
Your discussion of the big ambition failure mind brought to mind this post by Mark Manson. In it, he turns around the question of “what positive experience do you want?” to “what negative experience do you want?”. This quote is the relevant section (but all the post is great)
For most of my adolescence and young adulthood, I fantasized about being a musician—a rock star, in particular. Any badass guitar song I heard, I would always close my eyes and envision myself up onstage playing it to the screams of the crowd, people absolutely losing their minds to my sweet finger-noodling. This fantasy could keep me occupied for hours on end. The fantasizing continued through college, even after I dropped out of music school and stopped playing seriously. But even then it was never a question of if I’d ever be up playing in front of screaming crowds, but when. I was biding my time before I could invest the proper amount of time and effort into getting out there and making it work. First, I needed to finish school. Then, I needed to make money. Then, I needed to find the time. Then… nothing.
Despite fantasizing about this for over half of my life, the reality never came. And it took me a long time and a lot of negative experiences to finally figure out why: I didn’t actually want it.
I was in love with the result—the image of me onstage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I’m playing—but I wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it. Repeatedly. Hell, I didn’t even try hard enough to fail at it. I hardly tried at all.
The daily drudgery of practicing, the logistics of finding a group and rehearsing, the pain of finding gigs and actually getting people to show up and give a shit. The broken strings, the blown tube amp, hauling 40 pounds of gear to and from rehearsals with no car. It’s a mountain of a dream and a mile-high climb to the top. And what took me a long time to discover was that I didn’t like to climb much. I just liked to imagine the top.
As always, great post! I definitely prefer the ones about virtue with shifting and ambiguous meanings and value, because I learn more from these. Also liked your suggestion for learning how to fail productively; this video is my go-to when I forget the importance of failure.
Maybe I’m wrong, but in the full package of virtue, I see a sort of contentment (possibly about the struggle, but still contentment. Which appears antithetic with ambition to me. So I conjecture that while many parts of ambition are symptoms of virtue or lack thereof, a fundamental independent core still exists.
Your discussion of the big ambition failure mind brought to mind this post by Mark Manson. In it, he turns around the question of “what positive experience do you want?” to “what negative experience do you want?”. This quote is the relevant section (but all the post is great)